> To be competitive, we need to build diverse organizations where people have different strengths.
Exactly. And if your hiring process locks out someone who does not have a certain strength (such as negotiation), which is not directly relevant to their job (such as programming), you will miss out on people who could have great skills in the area that is relevant to what you're hiring for. This is unfair to potentially strong candidates, and bad for your company.
People are very willing to admit that most interviewing processes simply select for people who are good at interviewing, and tests select for people who are good at test taking - these methods sometimes overlap with what you're actually trying to measure, but are obviously flawed in many ways. The same goes for negotiating, which may have a tangential correlation with being an effective programmer in some contexts, but certainly not very directly.
Ellen Pao is trying to send a signal to people who are good at what they do, but put off or intimidated by playing hardball over salaries. If you like negotiating, you're not the intended audience.
